When you have scenes, characters, and plot points all over the place in your mind, it can help to be able to pull them together in a comprehensive pile so that they’re easier to work with. Preparing a premise (and then creating said premise) can help you do that!
Overview of the Five Ps
The five Ps of premise prep are:
These cover the major elements of any piece. From memoirs, to self-help books, to screenplays, to blog posts, to contracts, to magazine articles. We’ll focus on fiction, memoirs, and self-help throughout this course to help you understand the range of situations in which you can use this particular tool. The word ‘book’ is also used since most of you are novelists of some kind, but feel free to swap it out for whatever kind of piece you’re writing.
Start with the Person lesson to learn about describing your main character, yourself, or your book’s target audience.